I don’t know much about fishing, fishing lines, or fishing knots. Now, researching the bare minimum, somewhat arbitrarily, I find myself, as always, filling the gaps in my knowledge with mental images. The names of some of the most commonly used fishing knots are: Improved Clinch Knot, Palomar Knot, Trilene Knot, Blood Knot, and Loop Knot. In a Blood Knot, I imagine red blood cells entangled; the Palomar Knot could perhaps be used to fish for doves in Spanish-speaking countries. It seems many fishing lines are made of nylon and can withstand 2 to 14 kilograms of tension. None of these technical attributes truly matter, because the fishing lines that matter here were never used for fishing, but were instead carefully looped around the gate of a house.
The gate is a grating, a massive structure stitched together by metal columns and lines that interleave the view with their gaps, like a cell, forming a gridded vision of what lies inside: a scene watched through a camera grid, or a building that has also erected the markings of its blueprint. That is what you see: a house with a gate, like almost all of them in São Paulo. It could be any gate, but it is a specific, real one, belonging to a house just a few meters from the building where I live.
I walk past this gate practically every day. Framed by this grating, the inside is essentially a large garage where cars never enter. There is a ramp leading to a main door, right in the center, and a small staircase to the left, which seems to lead to an external service area or a garden. Aside from these two small passages, what you see behind the grate is ninety percent floor and wall. Of a beige color, unadorned, merely cement and neutral paint. If we were to walk the entire length of the house, it would measure about 15 paces long. There is always someone behind the gate’s grid, usually one or two people sitting on the small service stairs, smoking, talking, or watching people pass by on the street. Sometimes, there is an elderly man doing light gymnastics inside, walking back and forth with small weights tied to his ankles. Occasionally, there is an ambulance on site; I watch the paramedics on the sidewalk, I see one or two of the staff, always dressed in white. I observe the small central door left open, revealing almost nothing about what the place is like on the inside, or what is happening—but, being a nursing home, whenever I see that ambulance, I imagine the worst.
Four months ago, I noticed a woman, who appears to be in her seventies, with long, white, perfectly straight hair, begin tying fishing lines to the grating of the gate I described. I had seen her several times before, sitting on the service stairs, smoking; it caught my attention that once she held a small kitten on her lap, its fur as white as her hair. Now, she was looping the gate in a specific pattern, threading the fishing line from top to bottom, creating a design that resembles high-amplitude undulations. Opening science books, the wave pattern she was creating resembles illustrations of ultra-high-pitched sound frequencies, or ultraviolet electromagnetic frequencies—colors we cannot see, and sounds we cannot hear—leaving us only to imagine them.
And so I saw her, day after day, facing the gate with her lines, morning and afternoon, every single day. I never actually stopped to watch it; the glimpses I caught of everything happened in the few seconds it took me to pass by the place during the comings and goings of my routine. At first, I thought it was an unpretentious, though unsual, way for an elderly woman to pass the time, but I soon realized she was determined to weave the entire gate: a structure long enough to allow the passage of some three cars at once.
I followed the construction of these ever-expanding lines for close to a year. I found myself surprised by the evolution of the work. I started to think about it more. Was it some kind of therapeutic act, a ritual or a belief, was it intuitive or meticulously calculated? I did not know.
One day, I saw the work finally complete: every single square of the grating was filled with fishing lines—I say all of them, but I mean all of them up to about a third of the gate’s total height. I realized this was probably the maximum height she could comfortably reach without needing a ladder or a chair. I saw her behind that grate and behind those nylon weaves, smoking, with her kitten on her lap, now untroubled with touching any more lines. The work was done. I couldn’t help noticing that the mental time I began dedicating to the discovery and understanding of what she had done was equivalent to the time I dedicated to things – like artworks and movies – I deemed “intriguing”, to say the least.
I took photos, researched fishing lines (very little; everything I know has already been said) and images that reminded me of it. That was how I discovered the work of Judith Scott (1943-2005), an American artist who participated, posthumously, in the 35th São Paulo Biennial. Scott’s practice consisted of taking mundane objects she found along the way (chairs, wheels, pieces of wood) and wrapping them with threads, yarn, ropes, and ribbons until the original object vanished beneath a textile mass. Scott began her artistic practice at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, a non-profit organization that offers studios, materials, and classes for people with special needs to develop creatively. She attended the center until 2005, when she passed away. Today, her works are part of the collections of major art institutions like MoMA; she was also featured in the Venice Biennale in 2007.
Despite institutional recognition, Scott’s practice seems to come from a profound place, little or not at all premeditated. Regarding this, on the artist’s profile on the São Paulo Biennial website, curator Beatriz Martínez Hijazo states:
“In over a decade and a half of tireless production, the artist never gave titles to her works. She did not indicate how these works should be exhibited and did not even record her thoughts on her artwork. However, precisely because they are inscrutable, her works—which permeate the magical and the everyday, the visible and the hidden—resist classification. They are inscribed in the enigma, in those impossible choreographies that escape the rigidity of the univocal and remind us that the meaning of an art object always remains unfinished and incomplete: irreducible to a specific discourse, a specific imagination, or a system of mediation.”
“Inscrutable. They resist classification.” That is what I feel when I see Scott’s works. It is like entering a newly salvaged shipwreck from the bottom of the sea—reintroduced to terrestrial society just moments ago. We see how chairs, tables, plates, knives—objects so ignored and absolute—transformed upon being submerged under the effect of a different time, the time of the artist, within her own particular ecosystem. Some of Scott’s works are recognizable: a chair, a shopping cart; others require an X-ray to penetrate the thousands of layers of yarn to discover what that object once was. Scott submerges these objects in her private world, and, if they do not surface in time, they might become unrecognizable things—nameless things. Unclassifiable.
The X-ray is also a high-frequency electromagnetic wave, much like the lines on the gate. A technology made to discover what things are like on the inside. I wonder if this house, so close to mine, is not an unrecognizable, unclassifiable object to me. On the map, the residence has no name. What is left for me, once again, is to decipher it with mental images: to construct what the bedrooms, the pantry, the kitchen are like, to wonder if there is a garden, if they use glass or plastic cups, if there is a teatime, how many elderly people live there and if they are well cared for, what their names are, what their heights were before losing centimeters to age, what the straight-haired woman’s name is, what her cat’s name is, and, finally, why the fishing lines? This house is to me like those things we learn superficially, those secondary records whose utility we do not know, but which for some reason are also too precious to discard. So vast and murky to our everyday machinery, so distant from them, that to tie them into our minds, we must invent knots, which often come undone and become other knots—a new conjecture, another invention, a new story, a new grid. In a way, the house is not very different to me from a sunken ship. In these nursing homes, one might say that life seems to float, to a certain extent, apart from the outside world—could it be that objects whose names and functions we know so well don’t acquire, within these places, a different meaning?
Over time, the composition of lines began to change; some patterns lost their original shape, holes began to appear in the composition, lines were lost, lines loosened and began to take on different forms. The waves, once so montain-lie, constant, and uniform, began to resemble more an unpredictable sea, where storms and lulls freely intermingle. The composition of the grid kept changing, and the view I had of the house’s routine changed along with it. Later, I noticed gaps where the lines were entirely gone, and these absences multiplied as time went by. I watched someone create a thing (unclassifiable), and then I watched it age (in an unclassifiable way).
Now, a few months after I saw the completed work, the lines have almost entirely vanished I imagine when the gate will undergo another intervention. Perhaps this very year, they will paint it a different color. Perhaps next year, which is almost upon us, the nursing home will disband, and the next enterprise might want to remove it entirely, or reinforce it, perhaps adding a low wall in front of it, or a high-tech surveillance camera that would film me every time I walk past. It may be that the place turns into a fortress; perhaps it already is.
In addition to fishing and Judith Scott, I also researched the science of transparency (literally), with the same rigor (or lack thereof) with which I researched fishing. The names I liked the most were Transmittance, Absorbance, Diaphaneity Scale, Beer-Lambert Law; like the names of the knots, I have no idea what they mean, but they help me construct, once again, mental images regarding one final point: why did I notice all this? Why is it important to me?
Does the woman remind me of my grandmother? Physically, not in the least. It is true that grandma smoked for most of her life, but recently she quit smoking the purple filtered cigarettes. She, like me, knows nothing about fishing. She likes investigative shows, the CSI kind; she loves repeating the same stories from when I was a child, about how my favorite object in the world was once a little blanket she cut out of one of her dresses. But I don’t think so, the woman does not remind me of my grandmother. If she reminds me of anyone, perhaps it is myself, who writes in a somewhat inscrutable manner.
Today, in the composition of the house, there is nothing special, and no one will notice anything different about it, unless they happen to look down and still see, in some of the more remote and ignored corners, small nylon weaves that have somehow survived. What exactly they faced, I also do not know. I believe that at some point someone deliberately removed them—I wonder if it was their very creator who decided to put an end to it all.
The lady remains there. It has been a while since I last saw her cat, but she continues to smoke, sitting on the stairs. Sometimes our eyes meet. I never saw her with nylon lines in her hands again.
Nylon lines are also used to make beaded jewelry, such as necklaces and bracelets. This is a common activity in nursing homes, a way to pass the time creating, using one’s hands. One measures the size of the wrist or neck, cuts the thread, gathers the preferred combination of beads; when we create for someone else, we think of the combination that best translates them, and one by one, with patience (it is impossible to do it without it), we thread the line through each colored bead, and, at the end, we tie a knot. Another common activity is gardening and flower arranging. Perhaps now, in the backyard of the house, she is creating other unclassifiable things. Perhaps the fishing lines wearied of the gates and moved on to embrace orchids.
HIJAZO, Beatriz Martínez. Judith Scott. 35ª Bienal de São Paulo: coreografias do impossível. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2023.